With the launch of CPJ's most recent exile report, I will
have worked exactly three years for our Journalist Assistance
program. More than 500 cases later, I have helped journalists who have gone into hiding or exile to escape
threats; those in need of medicine and other support while in prison, and
journalists injured after violent attacks. The most harrowing accounts of
all, however, come from those crossing from Eritrea into Sudan. And things seem
to be getting worse, not better.

On Wednesday, the same day the White
House announced a strategic plan committing the United States to elevating its efforts in "challenging leaders whose actions threaten the
credibility of democratic processes" in sub-Saharan Africa, a senior
member of the U.S. Congress challenged the
erosion of press freedom in a key U.S. strategic partner in the Horn of Africa:
Ethiopia.

On the frontlines of global reporting, knowledge is safety. CPJ's
event series to promote our new Journalist Security Guide continued Wednesday in Washington,
D.C. where we teamed up with Internews for
a panel discussion on journalist security on-site and online.

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"I'm free but I don't feel free," said Mohamed Abdi Urad,
chief editor of Yool, a critical
weekly published in the semi-autonomous republic of Somaliland. Mohamed had
just been released on May 22 after a week in detention at Hargeisa Central
Police Station. His crime?
"I have no idea," he said. Mohamed had attempted to cover a deadly skirmish
between civilians and a military unit over a land dispute in the eastern part
of the capital, Hargeisa. "The Interior Minister just saw me walking towards
the scene and ordered his men to arrest me," he said. A few days later, police
released Mohamed unconditionally and without charge.

Joseph Mutebi, a photojournalist for the popular vernacular
state-owned daily Bukedde, spent his afternoon trying to
file a complaint with the police in the capital, Kampala. "First they told me
the officer who assaulted me was based at another station, so I went there and
now they are telling me he is based at the police station where I originally
went. So I am confused. I think they are just playing with me." Mutebi's case
is not uncommon--both in terms of the constant threat journalists face from
Uganda's police force and the challenges they encounter trying to file a
complaint.

Talking about genocide
prevention in the shadow of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps brings
an intense and unique gravity to the discussions. The academic presentations cannot
extract themselves from the looming presence of the barbed wires and grim
towers surrounding the Nazis' most infamous death factory.

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South African journalist and arts critic Charl Blignaut made
what turned out to be an excellent prediction. "Of all the work on show, it's
this depiction of the president that will set the most tongues wagging and most
likely generate some howls of disapproval," he wrote on May 13 in a review of
an art exhibition in Johannesburg.

At online discussion sites all over the world, comments are
posted on the Web as soon as they are written. People argue, inform, express
anger, and voice fears. Some say things in the heat of the moment that they
might go on to regret. Others are elliptical and obscure. The enabling of such
conversations is an important modern method of discovering and re-telling the
news, and encourages previously uninvolved readers of the news to help gather
and disseminate it--especially in times when traditional media is censored or
afraid.

On Sunday the general assembly of the Organization of
American States will convene in Bolivia in the verdant, highland valley city of
Cochabamba. The 35 member states (every nation in the region except Cuba) are
expected to vote on a measure that, if passed, could
curtail free expression and press throughout the hemisphere and put journalists
and others at greater risk.